Today, Explained - What was Putin the tea?

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

A chief political rival of Vladimir Putin has been poisoned in what Foreign Policy’s Amy MacKinnon says is a watershed moment for Russia. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. What if, instead of having an election, Donald Trump just poisoned Joe Biden and stayed in power forever? That'd be insane, right? That'd just be like Russia. Russia's leading opposition figure was poisoned with the military nerve agent Novichok. Alexei Navalny has been fighting for his life in a medically induced coma here in Berlin after falling ill in Siberia last month. Amy McKinnon has been covering Russia's latest poisoning for foreign policy, and she's here to help us understand why Russia, you know, keeps apparently poisoning people. So Alexei Navalny has been described as one of Putin's most feared foes.

He is the most prominent Russian opposition politician. He's very charismatic. He's handsome. He's a great talker. Corruption in Russia not became something like, you know, white collar crime or something. They're not just corrupt. They're involved in murders, in tortures. The main focal point of his campaigning has been anti-corruption, which has proven to

be immensely effective in a country like Russia, where corruption is just rampant. How corrupt do you think is Vladimir Putin? He's the czar of corruption. He's the basement of this corruption. In, I think it was 2011, he set up this foundation called Anti-Corruption Foundation. And it does what it says on the tin, it campaigns against corruption. But they also have basically a kind of giant team of investigative journalists, and they run these huge investigations into some of the most high-profile Russian politicians in the country.

And most famously, I think, in 2017, they went after who was then the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. Dmitry Medvedev, premier minister and former kind of yarn. It all begins with an email address, which a private email address used by Medvedev was hacked. And the contents of it was leaked online. And it didn't reveal anything too saucy or salacious, just that he's a bit of a nerd and has a real penchant for buying gadgets online

and buying sneakers. And so there was a hundred buck pair of Nike Air with these bright soles on them. And it was through that that they were able to trace the delivery address. And the delivery address revealed properties and how he had funneled, you know, an alleged billion dollar, that's billion with a B, in bribes through a network of foundations and companies to buy these luxurious properties. Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption group actually flew drones with cameras over the walls of Dmitry Medvedev's 45,000 square foot mountain chalet in Sochi.

It was vineyards, it was... This gigantic country house, country house complete with its own large man-made lake. These giant houses. His 17th century villa in Tuscany. Just like sprawling complexes. There was also this 30,000 square foot mansion in the Moscow suburbs. It also had its own lake, different shape. And in one of them, in his country home.

It's also got a modest little house built specifically for Mr. Medvedev's ducks. There was a teeny little house on the pond for ducks. The duck house. And so that became a real focal point of the investigation, this little duck house. And how did the Russian people react to the duck house? I mean, not well. Russian riot police broke up an anti-government protest

on what was a day of demonstrations across Russia. The idea that, you know, your hospitals and your schools are drastically short on funds and falling into disrepair and your prime minister has a cosy little house for his ducks doesn't go down too well with the electorate. Moscow police have arrested more than 700 people in the city alone. They included the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who's called for the demonstrations. These were some of the largest protests Russia has seen for several years.

President Putin still enjoys strong support, but he can't take that for granted. Navalny has hammered on time and time again at this real Achilles heel of the Kremlin, which is corruption. And that's the one thing I think that, you know, if I was Putin, I would realize that's what is going to get the public and the voters annoyed at him. And I imagine that brings us to Alexei Navalny being poisoned in late August. What exactly happened? So Navalny was in Siberia in the city Tomsk campaigning for local politicians. There's local elections coming up in Russia and Navalny was in town campaigning on behalf of opposition politicians. And very chillingly, on the eve of the day when he was poisoned, he was at a campaign event and someone asked him,

and this is a question Navalny has been asked many times over the years and many people have asked about him, which is, how come you're still able to do this? You know, so many opposition politicians have either been run out of the country or have been killed. How is it that in more than a decade of being a major thorn in the side of the Kremlin, basically, how is he still alive? After he was asked this question, Navalny said, if they kill me, it will just create more problems for those in power. And that was always the received wisdom about Navalny, that he just, he'd basically become too big to fail.

His fame and his success were seen as his protector for a long time, until it wasn't. So the next morning, Navalny is getting ready to fly back to Moscow from Tomsk and he was in the airport and we we've been able to piece together what happened that morning based on the accounts of his staff who were traveling with him but also people in the airport right he's a famous guy where he goes people want selfies they take pictures they post on Instagram. And so he arrives at the airport early in the morning. He consumes nothing all morning except for a cup of tea from the airport cafe.

And shortly after he boards the flight back to Moscow, he starts to feel unwell. And he goes to the bathroom and according to people on the flight, he's in there for a really long time. A queue starts to form and then the cabin crew are suddenly made aware that somebody on the flight is ill and they ask that all-time famous question that you see in the movies. Is anyone a doctor? And Navalny is on the floor at the back of the plane. You know, there's a whole group of people have gathered around him trying to keep him awake, keep him conscious. And people took videos where you can just hear Navalny letting out these just animal screams, these long, low screams of pain.

So the flight is redirected to Omsk, another city in Siberia, where he is taken off in an ambulance and he's placed in an artificial coma. And doctors there are pretty quick to deny that he's been poisoned. Russian doctors had initially suggested that his condition might be the result of low blood sugar. But of course, given the long and storied history of Kremlin opponents being poisoned, everyone pretty quickly begins to suspect that that's what's going on. Doctors in Siberia had refused to let Navalny seek treatment abroad and wouldn't let his wife see him. But after an international uproar,

the voice of Russia's opposition was flown to a Berlin hospital. Where doctors pretty quickly realized they're contending with something major and call in the army's chemical weapons experts. According to the German government, Navalny was attacked with a deadly nerve agent from the Novichok group. Novichok was used to poison the former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in the UK back in 2018. And the discovery that it was Novichok was really a turning point

because Novichok is just not something that you can just go to the hardware store and jerry-rig in your kitchen into a potentially lethal poison. Like this is, it's a chemical nerve agent. You know, very few people are going to have access to this. And so it just, it escalated the situation dramatically. German officials have already threatened possible sanctions against Russia over the poisoning. The future of a multi-billion euro joint German-Russian gas pipeline now in doubt. Germany and its allies are calling on the Kremlin to come up with some answers.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Amy, it occurs to me and I don't know, you know, everyone else who consumes news that Alexei Navalny is not the first notable Russian to be poisoned. So rattling off a list, I mean, some of the most famous ones are Georgy Markov, Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Alexei Navalny last year, Alexei Navalny this year, Vladimir Karamurza, Sergei Skripal, his daughter, Julia Skripal. Is there like a classic Russia poisoning story, a real caper?

So the most famous one, because of its just theatrical James Bond twist, was the poisoning of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978. Didn't they talk about this in Breaking Bad? Back in the late 70s, ricin was used to assassinate a Bulgarian journalist. KGB modified the tip of an umbrella to inject a tiny pellet into the man's leg. And we're talking about an amount not much bigger than the head of a pin. And he died from this umbrella stab? Oh, yes. Why so much poison, Amy?

So I think there's three big reasons why we see so many poisoning is traced back to Russia. I think the first one, you know, is just the chilling effect of it. You know, what a painful and horrible way to die. And even if you don't die, you live in fear of knowing, you know, will it happen again? One very well-known Russian opposition politician, Garry Kasparov, his bodyguards carry bottles of water and pre-prepared meals with him everywhere he goes because he's so terrified about being poisoned, as so many of his former colleagues have been. So the fear factor is certainly one thing.

Another is just the fact that they have it lying around. The story of poisonings goes back to basically the founding of the Soviet Union. Right at the time when the Soviet Union was created, Lenin ordered for there to be the creation of a lab, which would formulate these very discreet but very deadly poisons. And they just have these tools at their disposal, right? You work with what you're given. And I think the third major factor is plausible deniability. That there's this sly wink and a nod of saying, okay, clearly it was us, but, you know, prove it. You know, you saw that with the Litvinenko case where... It was the shocking murder of a prominent Russian dissident

seen here dying in his hospital bed. Now a British investigation has found that the two Russian secret agents accused of the murder, quote, probably acted with the approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ten years went by before a British inquiry finally concluded that he was poisoned at the hand of the Russian state and that likely Putin would have signed off on the operation. And he was poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive agent.

That stuff's just not lying around. And yet it still took them a decade to conclude that this was the Russian state. So plausible deniability is a cornerstone of how Russia operates in the world, especially abroad. I think that's a big part of why this happens. But in the case of Navalny, it's not clear yet whether we're actually going to find out who did this. And then, even if there is a transparent investigation to this, which I think is highly unlikely, you know, the best case scenario is you might find out, you know, the person who dropped it in his tea or however it was delivered. But what is difficult to know is who exactly ordered it. You're saying, once again, it'll be nearly impossible to prove Vladimir Putin himself signed off on this and ordered

the poisoning of his chief political rival. I think it's in the case of Navalny, given that he is the country's most famous opposition politician and that Novichok was used, I think it's highly unlikely that it has been possible to target, to harm and to kill opposition politicians, human rights activists and journalists, and more often than not with impunity. And it's certainly not beyond the realm of doubt that Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB officer, would resort to poisoning his opposition. It's definitely within his wheelhouse. I mean, he is firmly a KGB guy would resort to poisoning his opposition? It's definitely within his wheelhouse. I mean, he is firmly a KGB guy. It is the cornerstone of his identity. And the people he surrounds himself with are, if not former KGB or FSB officers, they're the security services. Those are his people. There's even a name for them in Russian,

it's the people who come from the power structures, from the military, from the FSB, from the intelligence agencies. That is very much Vladimir Putin's world and the turf which he's most comfortable in. How does this play out for Putin and his government at home? An integral part to these operations is disinformation. Is what, you know, what somebody once described as the fire hose of falsehoods. So things like when Russia invades eastern Ukraine, when they illegally annex Crimea, when a Russian missile shot down flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, when they poisoned Sergiy Skripal,

all of these kind of nefarious activities that they do overseas, and even domestically, they never try and persuade the public, both at home and abroad, of a single narrative. There's not propaganda which says, this didn't happen, this is what happened. They just pump out enough sludge, enough confusing and contradicting versions of what happened, that eventually the goal is that people just get bored and give up. And you saw the beginnings of that with Navalny poisoning, that, oh, was it a metabolic thing,

or was it his blood sugar, or maybe it was this there was some suggestion that he may have had substance abuse issues and they're not trying to convince people of any one theory but just enough so that people kind of can throw up their arms and just say who knows and that's the overarching goal in response to operations like this. Does this one feel any different though or is it just you know going to be the latest in a long line of crimes that will go unpunished? This does feel different. I think we are going to look back and see the poisoning of Navalny as a watershed moment, as one of several major turning points in the nature of the modern Russian regime under Putin.

Other poisonings which have been tried back to the Russian state have been against people perceived as defectors. And Putin is known to have a real particular deep hatred for defectors. He prizes loyalty above pretty much anything else. And so it's perverse to say, but it kind of made sense that those were the kind of people he would go after. And much as he is deeply afraid of Navalny, it's another bridge to go after your domestic opposition politicians and with such a lethal chemical weapon as Novichok. German officials have already threatened possible sanctions against Russia over the poisoning. The future of a multi-billion euro joint German-Russian gas pipeline now in doubt.

Germany and its allies are calling on the Kremlin to come up with some answers. I do not envy Angela Merkel right now. She's going to have to be the one to decide where to go next. I mean, Germany, the European Union has already sanctioned Russia for their activities in Ukraine. There has been growing calls in Germany for Angela Merkel to halt the construction of Nord Stream 2, which is a gas pipeline which runs from Russia to Germany. And it's like 90% complete already. It's almost there. But to use that as leverage would, of course, be significant and major, but a huge loss for the German companies involved as well.

So I think that's a big question going forward. It's whether that pipeline is going to take a hit because of this poisoning. Doesn't it just seem a little crazy? Maybe it doesn't seem crazy to you because you covered this, but I think to a lot of people, it seems just kind of insane that Russia gets to poison whomever they please. Yeah, it's nuts. It's crazy that Russia gets to invade Eastern Ukraine. It's crazy that Russia gets to invade eastern Ukraine. It's crazy that Russia de facto occupies 20% of the country of Georgia. It's crazy that they get to continually violate international norms and also the human rights of their population,

through epic, epic corruption like we discussed at the start. That the Russian population are not seeing the spoils of the wealth of their country in the way that they should because it gets pilfered off into mansions and houses for ducks. And what about Alexei Navalny? So he has emerged from his artificial coma. His condition has been described as critical but stable. And he's responsive to doctors, and I think it just remains to be seen

whether this will leave any lasting damage. Will it silence him? I highly doubt that. He's been through so much already. I feel like Navalny is committed to his cause, that he will keep going. Amy McKinnon. She's a staff writer at Foreign Policy.

You can find and support her work at foreignpolicy.com. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained.